Politics & Other Mistakes: Now, I don’t believe that anymore
Al Diamon
Back in 1994, being pro-choice on abortion was a popular political position – even for conservative Republicans. A solid majority of Maine voters had made it clear in earlier elections that they didn’t want government restrictions placed on a woman’s right to control her body. Candidates for high public office who espoused contrary views did so at their peril.
That year, Jim Longley Jr. was running for Congress in the state’s 1st District. Longley was reluctant to discuss abortion, but when pressed, claimed to favor keeping it legal.
Kinda.
Sorta.
Longley’s vagueness may have had something to do with not wanting to annoy several major donors to his campaign who were firmly pro-life. It may also have been an attempt to conceal his own anti-abortion inclinations. Whatever the reason, his careful treading around the question didn’t go unnoticed by one of his pro-choice opponents in the GOP primary.
“I would be hard pressed to trust him on this [issue],” the candidate told the Portland Press Herald, shortly before election day.
The outspoken young hopeful had good cause to contrast his unwavering stand for legal abortions with Longley’s wishy-washiness. Unlike Longley, he had served two terms in the Maine Legislature, where he had compiled a solid record of supporting reproductive rights. He voted against a bill that would have required parental consent before a minor could get an abortion. He received a 100 percent rating on an issues scorecard from NARAL, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. He told reporters he not only favored the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, but backed federal funding of abortions for low-income women and appropriations for family planning.
Although this stalwart fellow ended up losing the primary to Longley, he wasn’t discouraged. In 2004, he ran for Congress again, and this time he captured the Republican nomination. Since both he and his Democratic opponent, Tom Allen, were pro-choice, the issue wasn’t a major focus of the fall campaign, and Allen’s solid win had nothing to do with abortion.
Undaunted, our boy returned to the fray in 2008. He entered the GOP congressional primary in spite of being on active duty in Iraq with the U.S. Navy. His wife filled in for him during an early interview with the Press Herald. Asked his position on reproductive rights, she said, “He doesn’t condone abortion by any stretch of the imagination, but he does believe that it’s a person’s choice. It’s just not the government’s decision to make that choice for you.”
Tough to tell what he meant with that stuff about not condoning. But when he returned from the war, he was attacked by his Republican opponent, Dean Scontras, for allegedly making statements to some audiences that could have been interpreted as being pro-life. During a debate in May of ’08, he tried to set the record straight.
“I have not flip-flopped on abortion and [Scontras] knows that,” he said. “I’ve been pro-choice.”
A few days later at a forum in Portland, he reiterated his stand, according to the Bangor Daily News, saying he didn’t believe abortion was necessarily a good idea, but it was a private matter.
He won that primary, but lost the general election to Democrat Chellie Pingree. Again, abortion wasn’t an issue, since she, too was a supporter of a woman’s right to choose.
Now, it’s 2012, and our boy – a bit tattered and worn by two decades of unsuccessfully trying to fulfill his political ambitions – is running for the U.S. Senate. During a hard-fought Republican primary, he told the Maine Sunday Telegram he still favored legal abortions “with exception.” He didn’t explain what that exception might be. He had also changed his views on federal funding of abortions. He now opposed it.
Just before the June primary, he told the Bangor Daily, “I support a woman’s right to an abortion in the case of rape, incest and life of the mother.”
That’s a long way from what he said he believed in 2008. It’s even further from where he stood in 2004. And it’s in a different universe from 1994.
Even so, he won the nomination, but now faces independent Angus King and Democrat Cynthia Dill in the November balloting. Both are as unequivocally pro-choice as he so recently was.
Given his abrupt and curious shift on the issue, I called his campaign for some sort of clarification. I was told somebody would get back to me.
Nobody did.
Maybe even his staff can’t figure out where he stands from moment to moment on a woman’s right to choose. Or maybe they can and don’t want to deal with those disheartening charges of flip-floppery.
If you run into this once-valiant campaigner over the next few months, perhaps you can ask him what he really thinks and why he’s changed his mind.
As for his name, it’s the plural of a season that’s as fleeting in Maine as steadfastness to principle is in a politician.
If this is the winter of your discontent, email complaints to me at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
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Flip flopping is politics. They all do it. "Think" one way for certain reasons (being political) and another way for certain other reasons. It is bogus. Politicians try to make their "position" on matters in a manner such that will allow them an opportunity to sway voters, in whatever way that is. Insanity is trying to do the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Well, flip flopping (more than once, because people should be given the opportunity to have their opinions changed ONCE on a given matter- when one flip flops more than one time, red flags fly, questions are asked and fingers are pointed (not always the pointer)) can rarely trick the voters (unless you are soaked in kool-aid, in denial) and politicians are usually called out on it (again, unless you are soaked in kool-aid, in denial). With any luck, this country will straighten out, get back on the path of success and prevail, leaving all the liars, cheaters, criminals and flip floppers in the rear view mirror.
Cheers to November 2012, the most important election in the last 150 years, at least.
Guys it's Charlie Summers! It's Charlie Summers guys! He's talking about Charlie Summers!!!
Great article. Well researched, as always!
Regarding the alias:
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_B._Longley,_Jr.
In 1998, Longley campaigned for Governor and was defeated by popular incumbent Angus King, an independent. Longley came in second place and received 19% of the vote.
Funny!
I can't think of anything more depraved than a mother willfully killing her defenseless child regardless of the reasons behind it. Shame on the USA for legalizing abortion, and shame on the likes of Al Diamon for supporting it, regardless of popular opinion.
Regardless of your personal views on abortion, what makes you think you have a right to tell a woman what to do with her own body? Pro choice means pro choice. Not pro abortion. It means that a woman has the right to make the choice. The government deciding that would be depraved.
Flip-flopping? Maybe. But, maybe not.
Many,people have changed their views on abortion over the past few decades. More people are pro-life now as a result of being more informed about the humanity of unborn children. We can be especially thankful for the advances of ultrasound technology which shows, clearly, the separate life growing in the womb. Few women choose abortion after seeing images of their babies inside their wombs. Not so long ago, women were told that there was only something inside them that would become a baby. Now, it is clear that, right from the start, there is another person inside there -- dependent on his or her mother, yes -- but, not part of the woman.
Well, seeing as legalized abortions is one of the most notable differences between countries where women have rights and where women are oppressed, I think it is very important to protect the women's right to choose. If we take away choice, then women will go to drastic measures to end the pregnancy on their own, such as throwing themselves down a set of stairs, having an unsterelyzed "back alley" abortion, or using a coat hanger, as they did when it was illegal in this country and as they still do in other countries where it is illegal. It doesn't do any good to bury your head in the sand, whether abortion is legal or illegal, there will always be women desperate enough to find ways of ending an unwanted pregnancy. At least with abortion legalized it is ensured to be a relatively safe procedure for the women. I don't think I would personally have an abortion, but it is hard to know what you would do until faced with that situation. And, I certainly do not want to force my beliefs on others, since this was still a democracy when I last checked, not a theocracy.
What I think is ashame is that people vote for or against a candidate based on one aspect.
As far as Pro-choice, well what choice does the infant have in this regard? Why is their rights not being taken into account? I think it's too convienent for some to not to look at those children as individuals but as a mass of tissue and in some cases even after that child is fully developed and ready to be born.
I know nothing I say will change anything, just glad it's not me having to answer for it down the road is all.
I suspect much of this recent shift in public opinion on abortions is because the people who should be most involved - young women - have not known a world where pregnancy termination was not available. It is easy for a person to feel that abortion is wrong; it is easy for emotion to replace reason when you stick a newborn's face on a bundle of cells that, save for half a DNA strand, have all come from the mothers body. But while we ask ourselves "What if my mother had aborted me?" we can't forget to ask "What if I needed an abortion and could not get one?"
As someone who works in women's health, I have met many women who have had pregnancies terminated. Many of them go on to have planned pregnancies and grow strong, happy families. Their reasons for seeking abortions are legion, but the most frequent reason seems to be that they do not have the ability to adequately care for a child. Perhaps she is poor and barely able to support herself, perhaps she is in an abusive relationship, has mental health problems, or used recreational drugs with serious fetal consequences before realizing she was pregnant. She may have health problems, like poorly controlled diabetes that can lead to serious maternal or fetal illness. Or maybe she just knows she can't give a baby the life it deserves.
We ignore the woman with five kids she can't support, all of them fed, clothed, housed, and educated by the state while she calls herself 'mother' and if she treats them badly enough we will take them away so someone else can try to straighten them out, or at least push them through the system until they are old enough to have their own kids and get their own checks. But if she had chosen not to have those kids (establishing reliable birth control after an abortion is a standard of practice for health care providers so let's not pretend it would have been "five murdered babies"), had straightened her life out and continued her education and found a stable relationship and made the dozens of other choices that she would then have for a better life for herself and any children she has, and people want to condemn women for making those choices. But women of childbearing age today have never known a world where they couldn't control their reproduction. And if it has always been there, we take for granted that it will continue to be. For those of us who might make the tough choice, even if it is an ugly one, we have no fear that the choice will remain ours, how could it not? Even the opposition takes it for granted. For all the people who clamor for and end to free choice, they are most of them willing to ignore the five dirty children because they feel sad if they thiink about the tough choices she could have made to make the world better and keep our children better cared for. Where is the morality in that?
This is only becoming an issue today because women no longer know what it is like to have those choices made for them.
Charlie should be proud to be in the company of the presidential candidates who also had evolving positions. President Obama on gay marriage and immigration and candidate Romney on health care and abortion. Seems like evolving positions are non partisan.
It seems to me that even after birth, all through one's life actually, a person is never any more than "a bundle of cells that, save for half a DNA strand, have all come from the mothers body". If that is the grounds for the mother's right to terminate the life that animates that bundle of cells, what is to say that she doesn't have that right after she delivers that child into the world? How horrifying this kind of reasoning is.
After posting that last comment I thought I should have made it clear that I do not believe that a person is merely a bundle of cells. I believe that the life that is at the core of every human being, no matter how young and immature, is a gift from God Himself, and that we have no right to willfully take that life for any reason. That we as a society have talked ourselves into the killing of an unborn child in the name of "mercy" and "justice" is so wrong.
The argument that abortion solves the dilemma of a woman's being unable to care for a child is an empty, groundless argument.
The baby, whose mother won't be able to care for him/her or who is unwanted by his/her birth mother, can be given up for adoption by parents who have been waiting for and wanting a baby to adopt.
ann d., in a way, you're right. there are always people who are kind and loving enough to adopt white american babies without birth defects. this is of little comfort to a woman who wants an abortion because she was raped or who knows her unborn child will not survive the term.
Whats your views on Pingree vs LePage?